I recently spoke with Yahoo! Parenting about the recent cover of Sports Illustrated and the message it’s sending to our children.
“Confusing” is the term So Sexy So Soon co-author Diane Levin opts for. “Starting from young age, children are figuring out, ‘What does it mean to be a boy? What does it mean to be a girl?’” Levin, a professor of education in the Department of Early Childhood Education at Boston’s Wheelock College, tells Yahoo Parenting. Catching sight of all that skin, glorified on the newsstand at the grocery store, “becomes an important part of what they understand as to what it means to be girl and what people value,” she says. “It shows them girls are supposed to be pretty, and how you look is really important. It says, ‘Don’t think about what lies underneath, just focus on appearance. Being sexy is what’s valuable.’”